The dragons sang their own wild song, putting up
their heads to the sky and howling joyously.
‘I’ve heard that the sky in America,
Is a blue that you wouldn’t believe,
But Berk is my lobster after all,
And now I’ll ne-e-ever leave…’
‘What does “Berk is my lobster” mean, exactly?’
Hiccup asked the Wodensfang. ‘It was the line that
told me the Jewel was inside the lobster necklace.
But I’ve always wondered what it meant, it sounds
like nonsense…’
Wodensfang sighed romantically.
‘Lobsters, you see, are a symbol of love,’ said the
old dragon, ‘because they mate for life…’
‘The lobster necklace must have been the one
that Grimbeard gave to his wife Chin-hilda when they
got married then,’ said Hiccup thoughtfully in Norse,
‘and she gave it back to him when she left him in a fury.
Grimbeard probably wore it because he regretted his
lost love.’
‘Lobster necklaces are a symbol of love, are they?’
said Fishlegs, looking interested.
‘Fishlegs, if you start sending Barbara the
Barbarian lobster necklaces I am going to get very cross
with you,’ said Hiccup, waving his arms around in an
agitated way. ‘DON’T SEND HER ANYTHING!
HER FATHER ISN’T GOING TO LIKE IT! THAT’S
WHY HE’S GIVEN HER SIX BODYGUARDS!
REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME!’
‘I was on my way to America,
But I took a left turn at the Pole,
And I lost my shoe in a rainy bog,
Where my heart got stuck in the ho-o-o-ole!’
Fishlegs sang this particularly loudly, because despite
finding out during the course of his Quest that he was
part Berserk, part Murderous, part Treacherous, and
mostly No-name… he was still a Hooligan by adoption,
if not by birth.
And then they all sang an old Viking Archipelago
song called Not The Settling Kind, that says so much
about the yearning wild spirit of Vikings (and indeed,
dragons), and sounds particularly good when sung in a
ruined Castle under a starlit sky.
It goes like this:
‘I have never cared for Castles
or a Crown that grips too tight,
Let the night sky be my starry roof
and the moon my only light,
My Heart was born a Hero,
my storm-bound sword won’t rest,
I left the Harbour long ago
on a Never-ending Quest,
I am off to the horizon,
where the wild wind blows the foam,
Come get lost with me, love,
and the sea shall be our home!’
All of the Viking voices were perfectly in unison, apart
from Humungously Hotshot the Hero and Tantrum,
who had never been able to sing. Tantrum
had forgotten all about the Hogfly for the
moment, and was happily embracing her
Hero, singing with him, wildly out of
tune with everyone else, but happily in
tune with one another.
Not the Settling Kind was
Tantrum and Hotshot’s favourite
song, and as they reached the big notes together at
excruciating volume, it was a happy reminder that,
argue though they may, love was always worth it.
‘Do you want your foghorn back, Barbara?’
King Hiccup the Third asked Barbara the Barbarian
as she sang at the top of her voice with all of her six
bodyguards and the cat joining in.
Barbara broke off a moment, and looked
thoughtfully at the massed Tribes of the Archipelago,
singing their hearts out.
‘No, you keep it,’ she said at last. ‘I think you’re
going to need it.’
Ah yes, how true that was.
It is one thing to decide you are going to create a
new and more civilised World, and quite another to put
that idea into action.
Things would change, in time, for Hiccup would
never let them go back to that old World of slavery and
intimidation.
But there were some things that would never
change.
Young bards would still fall hopelessly in love
with princesses out of their league. Chiefs would
quarrel, and dragons would fight, and storms would
blow, and trouble would follow trouble, just as it had
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in the Old World.
But all of this was in the future.
Right here, right now, the Witch and Alvin were
dead, and the Dragon Rebellion was over.
Right here, right now, Hiccup and his Ten
Companions of the Dragonmark were all together.
Hiccup, Toothless, Fishlegs, Camicazi, Windwalker,
Deadly Shadow, Stormfly and Wodensfang, not to
mention Horrorcow, crowded around the King’s Stone.
Stoick, Valhallarama, Bertha of the Bog-Burglars,
Humungously Hotshot and Tantrum the Heroes and
the Ten Fiancés, the massed Tribes of the Archipelago
and the Wanderers, Bearcub and his older sister
Eggingarde, all of the former Slaves and their former
Masters, they were all there.
(Even Norbert the Nutjob was there,
unbeknownst to anybody, complete with a Dragonmark
and disguised as a Wanderer, but that is another story.)
None Left Behind….
The Vikings had changed their tune, perhaps
realising that they wanted to end this night on a high
note, and they began to sing one of the most rousing,
happiest Viking songs of all.
Because they had remembered who they were
this day.
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They were Vikings. A wild wandering people, like
the dragons, who fought for freedom, and equality in
the eyes of Thor, and the wild places of the world.
‘UP WITH YOUR SWORD AND STRIKE
AT THE GALE!
RIDE THE ROUGH SEAS FOR THOSE
WAVES ARE YOUR HOME!
WINTERS MAY FREEZE BUT OUR
HEARTS DO NOT FAIL!
HEROES… HEARTS… FOREVER!’
They were all there, singing their hearts out, all
together, and out in Wrecker’s Bay, Luna and her wild
dragons joined in the Vikings’ song, shooting great
joyful fireballs into the air as the fins of Sharkworms
broke in the Bay like dolphins. And down, ticking in
the grasses, the nanodragons were singing too, rubbing
their hind legs together as they sang joyfully, in tiny
squeaking voices:
‘YOU MAY BE SMALL BUT YOUR HEART CAN BE LARGE
WORK ALL TOGETHER AND MOUNTAINS MAY MOVE
DON’T JUDGE A GRUB BY THE SIZE OF HIS WINGS
FOR YOU CAN’T ALWAYS SEE… A HERO!’
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It is dark, so the humans and the dragons cannot see
the blackened world about them. But that is fine, for
they can already see in their minds’ eye, the whole
world green once again with the shoots of spring.
The humans are building those castles in their minds
already: finer houses, newer villages, better harbours.
The dragons hear the wild north calling them with the
promise of a free open oce
an and impossibly blue skies,
where death has no dominion and they can fly forever,
like the Dragon Guardians shooting and rocketing
above them in endless black space.
‘YOU ARE NEVER ALONE IF THE SEA
IS YOUR FRIEND…
RIDING THE WAVES OF IMPOSSIBLE
QUESTS…
IF IT DOESN’T END WELL,
THEN IT ISN’T THE END…
A HERO… FIGHTS… FOREVER!’
There they are, all of them together, singing their hearts
out on the top of that Ruined Castle on Tomorrow. War
is over; their bellies are full of fish and deer, and they
are full of hope and joy, and excitement about their
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future. They sing long, long into the night, bursting
with happiness, the quiet moon shining down on them,
under a brilliant canopy of stars.
‘THE HERO CARES NOT FOR A WILD
WINTER’S STORM,
FOR IT CARRIES HIM SWIFT ON THE
BACK OF THE WAVE,
ALL MAY BE LOST AND OUR HEARTS
MAY BE WORN,
BUT A HERO… FIGHTS… FOREVER!’
And if this moment doesn’t last forever… then it really
ought to.
So that is where we will leave them, Hiccup and
his friends: forever young, forever hopeful, singing their
hearts out on the island of Tomorrow.
BECAUSE…
If it doesn’t end well, then it isn’t
THE END
EPILOGUE BY HICCUP
HORRENDOUS HADDOCK THE
THIRD, THE LAST OF THE
GREAT VIKING HEROES
So that is the story of how I became the King of the
Wilderwest and ended the Dragon Rebellion.
Now I am an old, old man, it feels so strange to
look back at my younger Hiccup-self, whom we just left
among the ruins of Grimbeard’s Castle, looking into
the future, so confident, so hopeful, so sure in what he
was going to do.
And now I look back and I wonder, just as the
Dragon Furious wondered long ago as he lay dying on
the Reef:
Was my life a failure, or was it a success?
I did build my new Kingdom of the Wilderwest. I
rebuilt Grimbeard’s Castle, and the flags fly from
twenty towers, even stronger and more solid than they
were before. There is now a bustling city on Tomorrow,
a harbour crowded with life and ships. Looking at it
now, you would never believe that when I was young
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this was a desolate ghost of a town, where the wind
howled through the empty streets and the ruins had
fallen into the bog.
And more importantly, just as I pledged to
myself when I came back from discovering America,
the-Land-which-does-not-Exist, I built a Barbaric
Archipelago in which might was no longer right, where
it is not only the strong that belong. I built a world
where weaker Tribes such as the Peaceables, and the
Wanderers, the Nowhere Men and the Quiet-Lifes all
have their vote and a say at the Thing.
None Left Behind…
The world of my childhood was a wondrous
world indeed, full of excitement and adventure, but it
was also a world in which small children lived in daily
fear of death by wolves, by dragons roaming wild, by
starvation and by war.
That is no longer true.
We barbarians are proud barbarians still, but
along the way we have grown up. We have put down
our swords and picked up our pens instead, and have
almost become, dare I say it… civilised.
So, in that, my life has been a success, and I have
done good work as a King and as a Hero.
But as I grew older, and older, and realised that
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I would not live for ever, I began to wonder whether I
had really changed the world sufficiently that it would
be safe for dragons in the future when I am gone? And
I know that human nature has not changed enough,
yet.
So, in that, I failed.
But as the Wodensfang and the Dragon Furious
said, perhaps it is a noble failure, and history is a
succession of these noble failures.
I never spoke to Luna directly about this. But I
did not need to. She knew it, maybe always knew it,
and slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, over the course
of my lifetime, the dragons began to hide.
They did not leave immediately. It did not happen
like that. It was a very gradual retreat. At first, a few
of the wilder species retreated to the north, to the
oceans, to the deep seas. But still more stayed in the
Archipelago. Our riding-dragons and hunting-dragons
did not want to leave our side, so they stayed with us,
out of their own free choice.
Thank Thor, I myself have still lived a life that has
been full of dragons.
All my life I have flown on the back of
Windwalker, high so high. All my life Toothless has
been there, sitting on my shoulder, answering me back,
483
stealing the food from my plate when I’m not looking.
A Seadragon like Toothless, of course, lives for
many thousands of years; throughout my life, he barely
grew up at all. While I, of course, grew up, got married,
became a powerful King and had children of my own,
Toothless remained the same.
But we taught our own children to ride horses
and train hawks as well as dragons – just in case.
When I was a young man, the world still seemed
full of dragons, very much awake, very much as fierce
and as dangerous as they had ever been, out in the
wilderness of the Open Ocean. One of them, the
Doomfang, saved my life a dozen times or more out
there. And many more nearly took my life away from
me as well…
But maybe the dragons felt a little uncomfortable
with the new, civilised world that I was building.
Dragons have always been wild creatures for wild
times. Or maybe they sensed what Furious sensed,
that my struggles to change the world could never be
successful in one generation alone.
As I have said, they began to hide.
They retreated north to be with their fellow
dragons. They migrated into the deep-sea trenches I
was telling you about, and put themselves into Sleep
484
Comas. Many of them developed the chameleon
skills of a Stealth Dragon, and disguised themselves
so effectively in the grasses and the rocks and the
seas, that you would not even notice they were there,
particularly if you did not know you were looking for
them.
Sometimes, I used to lie very still on my stomach
in the bracken, and stare very hard, and if I stayed
there for a long time, then slowly, slowly, I could
begin to see again the dim outline of a Tiddly-Nip
Tick-Botherer, or a Drowsy-Tipped Dragonmouse,
materialising in front of me for one second as it
scurried camouflaged through the grasses – and then it
was gone.
That was how I knew th
ey were still there.
It has only been in the last couple of decades of
my life that the dragons have begun to hide in earnest.
Gradually, in the last few years, even Toothless
and Windwalker began to spend time away from me.
They were restless for the fellowship of the other
dragons in the pin-sharp cold waters, the innocent cruel
snows of the north. They began to leave me for short
stretches of time, and then slightly longer, and longer
again. They always returned, however. Toothless would
never leave me forever.
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And that was when I began to fulfil my promise to
the Dragon Furious.
I instructed Fishlegs and his fellow bards to
create stories suggesting that the dragons were only
ever fictional creatures. People do not believe that yet,
of course, for they have seen dragons with their very
own eyes. But as the dragons disappear into hiding,
and the people who have seen dragons with their own
eyes grow old and die, well…
… the stories will live on.
Stories always do live on, and the stories that
Fishlegs tells are that dragons do not, and have never
existed.
This belief will keep the dragons safe.
So, you see, I did save the dragons.
It was not in the way that I hoped, perhaps, but
I kept my promise to the Dragon Furious, and I saved
the dragons nonetheless.
My Plan, crazy though it was, is working.
And in fact, it is working so effectively that
sometimes even I, in my childish old age, cannot
remember – did they exist or did they not?
Although it was all my own idea to make a fantasy
out of their reality, I myself can get confused, so
completely have they vanished. Could such magnificent
486
creatures really have flown the skies, and swam the seas
of my childhood?
I am feeling a little weak now; weak, but also
excited. I sense an ending coming, or should I call it a
new beginning?
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Fight a Dragon's Fury Page 26
